Database Reference
In-Depth Information
3.
The web browser processes the response and displays the result on the web
page.
4.
The user inputs data or performs some action that forces data to be sent again
to the web server.
5.
HTTP will POST the data back to the web server, and the web server processes
that data.
6.
HTTP sends the response to the web browser.
7.
The web browser processes the response and displays the result on the web
page.
Now that you have a general understanding of the communication process, let's take a closer look at
each of the key components.
The Web Server
The web server is responsible for receiving and handling all requests coming from browsers through
HTTP. After receiving a request, the web server will process that request and return the response to the
browser. Right after this, usually the web server will close its connection with the database and release all
resources, opened files, network connections, and so forth, which become part of the request to be
processed on the web server.
The web server does all this cleaning of data, resources, and so on, in order to be stateless. The term
state
refers to the data that gets stored between the request sent to the server and the response delivered
to the browser.
Most of today's web sites run as applications and consist of many web pages, and data on one web
page is often responsible for the output that will be displayed on the next web page. In this situation,
being stateless defeats the whole purpose of such web sites; therefore, maintaining state becomes
important.
To be stateful, the web server will keep connections and resources alive for a period of time by
anticipating that there will be an additional request from the web browser. ASP.NET offers various
techniques as counter approaches for stateless behavior, such as cookie, view state, query strings,
session and application state, and so on.
The Web Browser and HTTP
The web browser is the client-side application that displays web pages. The web browser works with
HTTP to send a request to the web server, and then the web server responds to the web browser or web
client's request with the data the user wants to see or work with.
HTTP is a communication protocol that is used to request web pages from the web server and then
to send the response to the web browser.
Understanding ASP.NET and Web Pages
ASP.NET is available to all .NET developers, because it comes with the Microsoft .NET Framework.
ASP.NET provides a web development model to build web applications by using any .NET-compliant
language, such as C#. ASP.NET code is compiled rather than interpreted, and it supports the basic
features of the .NET Framework such as strong typing, performance optimizations, and so on. After the
